This issue brief about HIV, harm reduction and the sexual and reproductive health and rights of women who use drugs is part of a series of briefng papers, commissioned by the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS (GCWA), and is designed to provide up-to-date information around key issues concerning HIV prevention, treatment and care related to women and girls. Harm reduction refers to policies, programmes and practices that aim to reduce the harms associated with the use of psychoactive drugs. The defning features are the focus on the prevention of harm, rather than on the prevention of drug use itself, including a focus on people who continue to use drugs.

Despite the increasing number of studies being conducted on violence against young married women elsewhere, this subject has received little attention from researchers and policy makers in Nepal. This paper assesses the prevalence of violence among young married women in rural Nepal. Specifically, it examines women’s status in order to better understand the risk of violence. A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2009 among 1,296 young married women aged 15-24 years in four major ethnic groups.

The aim of this study is to identify the prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) against Japanese women (JW) and non-Japanese women (NJW) in a perinatal setting. Additional purposes were to identify the associated factors of IPV, describe the characteristics of IPV against NJW, and assess the acceptability of the Violence Against Women Screen (VAWS) instrument as a screening tool. A cross-sectional survey was conducted from September to November 2007 in an urban hospital maternity clinic in Tokyo, Japan. Women who attended the maternity clinic received the VAWS instrument, which was translated into four languages (Japanese with Kanji and Hiragana, English, Chinese, and Tagalog) and was used to identify IPV.

The military component of peacekeeping operations can play a vital role in the protection of women and children as part of its mandated task of protecting civilians. This means not only protecting women from the violence itself, but also supporting individual social and economic recovery afterwards. In support of these goals, we aspire to recruit more women in uniform to help provide this critical aspect of security in peacekeeping operations, and to ensure that all of our personnel understand that enhancing women’s safety enhances mission success. The United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations Office of Military Affairs (OMA) has been actively engaged in this work, and has participated in assessment missions, with technical and financial support from UNIFEM, to areas where sexual violence has been a prominent feature of the conflict and its aftermath.

The Agenda for Accelerated Country Action for Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV 2010–2014 (Operational Plan) supports the implementation of the UNAIDS Action Framework: Addressing Women, Girls, Gender Equality and HIV.1 The Action Framework was developed in response to the pressing need to address the persistent gender inequalities and human rights violations that put women and girls at a greater risk of HIV, and increase their vulnerability. These factors also threaten the gains that have been made in preventing HIV transmission and in increasing access to antiretroviral therapy. The UNAIDS Action Framework focuses on action in three areas in which UNAIDS and UNIFEM can make specific and unique contributions.

Gender-based violence against women has gained recognition under International law, in the jurisdictions of international courts and tribunals, in the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) itself and under the Security Council‟s effort to broaden their approaches to peace and security. But an intertwined approach is still lacking and a concerted and coherent response from the UN system is needed. CEDAW obliges State parties to provide information on the implementation of these resolu-tions and to ensure that these rights are realized by setting up adequate responses to women‟s needs and protection. In the light of SCR 1820, CEDAW and the approach that sexualized violence in conflicts is foreseeable, we argue that Sri Lanka violated several Articles of CEDAW.

Significant progress is being made in the global scale-up of prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT), including in high burden and resource-limited settings. For the first time, the elimination of mother to-child transmission of HIV (MTCT) is now considered a realistic public health goal and an important part of the campaign to achieve the millennium development goals. In the light of the global effort, it is critically important to provide the best evidence-based interventions to reduce the risk of transmission from an HIV-infected mother to her newborn child, while at the same time promoting the health of both the mother and the child.

The Balochistan Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) was conducted by the Planning and Development Department, Government of Balochistan in May through September 2010. The main objective of the survey was to provide updated information about the health of young children and their mothers to formulate strategic planning for their improvement in future.

Amnesty International has prepared this report with the aim of supporting the work of Cambodian women’s rights organizations, service providers and others working to protect and defend women and girls who are subjected to rape and other sexual violence. The report is part of Amnesty International’s global campaign “Stop Violence Against Women”. The report is based on research trips to Cambodia in April and November-December 2009, and draws on interviews in Battambang, Siem Reap, Phnom Penh and Kampong Thom with some 30 female victims of rape from across ten provinces, and around a dozen of their family members. The violations described in the report took place between early 2006 and December 2009.

In order to monitor the ongoing health and family welfare programmes, the need for a database at the district level was felt by the Government of India. For this, the District Level Household and Facility Survey (DLHS) was undertaken. The present District Level Household and Facility Survey (DLHS-3) is third in the series preceded by DLHS-1 in 1998-99 and DLHS-2 in 2002-04. DLHS-3 is one of the largest ever demographic and health surveys carried out in India, with a sample size of about seven lakh households covering all districts of the country. DLHS-3, like other two earlier rounds, is designed to provide estimates on maternal and child health, family planning and other reproductive health indicators.